The Africans

by David Lamb

  Most of the white settlement before this century was comprised of degredadas—criminals sentenced to Angola rather than to jail in Portugal. As recently as 1950, half the white population in Angola had never attended school, and another 40 percent had completed no more than four years of primary school. Unlike, say, the Kenyan highlands, which were settled by upper- and middle-class Britons, Angola had become a dumping ground for illiterate European peasants. And a miserable lot they were. Unable to find suitable work in the cities, many drifted into the villages, took up with African peasant women and “went native,” living as bare a subsistence existence as the poorest black farmer.

  The Portuguese did two things unique to European colonialism in Africa: they built beautiful cities, such as Luanda and Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in Mozambique, and they intermarried to such an extent that their former colonies today are among the most multiracial countries in Africa.

  “God created the whites and the blacks,” old settlers in Angola used to say, “but the Portuguese created the mestiço [person of mixed blood].” The racial mix, however, probably had more to do with promiscuity and sexual ratios than tolerance. There were, for instance, eleven white men for every white woman in Angola in 1846.

  Ninety-nine of every 100 Portuguese in Angola lived in the cities. This meant that Lisbon’s influence in the countryside was limited and Angola’s farmlands were not developed to anything approaching their full potential. The Portuguese did not have the attachment to the land or the commitment to national development that the British had in Kenya. Their emotional ties belonged to another continent, and it was as easy for them to leave as it had been for them to come. Lisbon tried numerous schemes to reverse the white urbanization. At one point in the 1950s it even offered every married Portuguese farmer over thirty years of age a free fifty-acre plot with a cow, sheep, a pig, six chickens, six ducks and some rabbits. Scarcely more than a hundred Portuguese a year took advantage of the opportunity.

  By the early 1960s, France and Britain were cutting their colonial ties to Africa. But Portugal’s premier, António de Oliveira Salazar, the last of the West European dictators, refused to even consider eventual independence for his African colonies, contending that they formed an integral part of Portugal. (A sign outside the city hall in Lourenço Marques announced: “Here is Portugal.”) In 1961, black nationalists took up arms against the colonial authorities, and Lisbon found itself fighting two separate independence wars in Angola, one against a movement advocating Marxism, the other against an organization whose orientation was pro-Western and capitalistic. As so often happens in Africa, the nationalists themselves were divided by tribal and ideological differences, and once the Portuguese were defeated, they turned their guns on one another, Three movements figured in the liberation war and the civil war that followed:

  The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), Marxist and supported by the Soviet Union, was formed in 1956 with the help of the Portuguese Communist Party. Its principal guerrilla bases during the fourteen-year independence war were named Hanoi II and Ho Chi Minh. Its key figures were mostly mestiço urban intellectuals. Agostinho Neto, the MPLA leader and later the first president of Angola, visited Washington in 1962, seeking economic help from the West. But U.S. economic and political interests in Africa had always lain with the colonial powers, not the black liberation movements, and the Kennedy Administration snubbed Neto. The slight pushed this man, who would become one of Africa’s most important revolutionary leaders, further into the Soviet camp.

  The National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) was formed in 1962 and soon set up a government-in-exile in neighboring Zaire. It was backed by Western countries, including the United States, and led by Holden Roberto, who was named for a British Baptist missionary and was a descendant of the Kongo monarchy. It had the largest guerrilla army in the independence war, about 15,000 men.

  The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) was formed in 1966 after a split in FNLA. It was supported at various times by China, the United States and South Africa and led by a bulky, bearded, Swiss-educated guerrilla named Jonas Savimbi, a member of the dominant Ovimbundu tribe.* UNITA was the only faction in the war committed to the electoral process. Savimbi was shunned by black Africa after he called on South Africa for military help and the Pretoria troops, both black and white, swept to within seventy-five miles of Luanda on the eve of independence.

  The military coup in Lisbon in April 1974 led to major policy shifts, including Portugal’s decision to grant early independence to its African colonies. Just before the panicked white exodus, Lisbon worked out a complicated agreement with the three factions in Angola to form a tripartite transitional government. The deal was a failure. Neto’s MPLA sought a military victory over the two pro-Western groups and asked for Cuban assistance. Help was quick in coming, and within a matter of weeks Neto had 20,000 Cuban combat troops and more than 1,500 Soviet and Eastern-bloc advisers on Angolan soil. The choice Washington faced was to sit by and watch a Marxist government come to power or to step up its covert support for Roberto and Savimbi, enabling one of them to make the final push into Luanda and establish himself as the head of a pro-Western government. President Gerald R. Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger favored the latter course, which would have represented a major setback to the Soviet interests in Africa. But the U.S. Congress, weary of another Vietnam-type involvement, was unwilling to confront the Eastern bloc for African real estate and after long debate it cut off funds for Roberto and Savimbi. (Up to that point, Washington had pumped about $40 million into Roberto’s and Savimbi’s movements.) South Africa, whose invasion of Angola had been encouraged by Washington, withdrew, quite rightly feeling betrayed. For Neto, the dream was at hand. And in a somber ceremony on November 11, 1975, with enemy African soldiers almost within gunshot range of Luanda, Neto became president of Africa’s forty-eighth independent nation.

  Neto had been imprisoned four times by the Portuguese for anti-colonial activities. He was a recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize. He had the credentials of a true revolutionary, and indeed, by planting Marxism on the doorstep of South Africa, he changed the political balances across the southern third of Africa. But Neto (“Our Immortal Guide,” as the Angolans called him) was certainly not the ogre the West had expected. He was a published poet, a physician, an articulate spokesman for the rights of the underprivileged. His rule was neither corrupt nor overly repressive, and even Neto’s harshest critics were surprised at his willingness to compromise: he invited the thousands of Angolan exiles in Portugal to return home and help rebuild the country; he reached an accord of friendship with Zaire, which had harbored his enemies; he flew off to Guinea-Bissau for a cordial three-day meeting with Portugal’s president, António Ramalho Eanes. Before he died in 1979 in Moscow of cancer at the age of fifty-six, Neto had come to realize that he needed economic assistance the Soviet Union could not provide. He started inquiring about the West’s willingness to help and told confidants he was uncomfortable with the realization that his government’s survival depended on the military presence of a foreign country, Cuba.

  During the 2,000-mile trip I made through Angola, most of the Cubans I encountered in Luanda and the major rural areas were civilians—teachers, doctors and government administrators. They approached me with curiosity, not hostility. But as I traveled south, into the rural areas of central Angola, Cuban soldiers were very much in evidence and my government translator made no attempt to steer me away from them. In Huambo, a once lovely farming town that had turned into an unsightly slum in less than ten years’ time, I saw military convoys rumbling toward the front with uniformed Cuban soldiers. Others strolled through the streets in small groups and some played baseball in an open field strewn with garbage. I tried to find out how many Cubans had died defending the Angolan government. No one would answer in anything but the vaguest term, though it is pretty well established that Cuba’s casualties numbered in the thousands.


  Most Western governments were responsive to Neto’s overtures for help. Washington, however, saw a Communist under every Angolan bed and refused to even recognize the Neto regime or that of his successor, José Eduardo dos Santos. It said formal relations could not be established until the Cubans started withdrawing and Savimbi was included in a new government. The demands were as absurd as if Angola had told a U.S. President whom to put in his Cabinet and had insisted that he start pulling American troops out of West Germany. The United States would have been much wiser to have recognized the Angola government and assisted it with a modest aid program aimed at economic recovery. Such moves would at least have made Angola realize that it did have options in choosing its foreign friends. As it was, the United States only succeeded in convincing Angola that Washington was more concerned with the Soviet presence in Africa than with a country’s economic development, an assumption that was probably correct.

  On the eastern side of Angola, facing the Indian Ocean, was Portugal’s other important African colony, Mozambique. It, too, gained independence in 1975 after a long guerrilla war, and its government, like Angola’s, is Marxist and closely aligned with the Soviet Union. Though Mozambique is not blessed with great mineral resources—its major export is cashew nuts—the country’s deterioration has been less dramatic than Angola’s for two reasons: first, Mozambique maintains close economic ties with its prosperous neighbor, South Africa; and second, despite some antigovernment guerrilla resistance, President Samora Machel has not had to contend with a major civil war like the one Jonas Savimbi continues to wage in Angola.

  This has given Mozambique a little breathing space. In Maputo, a capital nearly as beautiful as Luanda, I was impressed to find the streets spotlessly clean and amazed to see volunteer work crews collecting garbage at dawn each morning. “People’s committees” had taken over the hotels and restaurants and performed their duties with a smile, if not efficiency. In the countryside schoolhouse, lights burned late as many thousands of adults learned to read and write in one of Africa’s most ambitious literacy campaigns. When I asked a farmer if he was embarrassed to be in the first grade studying the alphabet at the age of fifty, he replied, “No. I am thrilled. I can write my name.”

  Machel’s goal is to create in Mozambique what he calls “The New Man” of Africa—an educated, politically aware nationalist who works for the common good. Those who do not conform to this vision are sent to one of the country’s eight re-education camps, modeled after similar centers set up by the Communists in Vietnam. Mozambican officials won’t say how many people are in the camps but Western intelligence sources place the number at about twelve thousand. On one visit to Mozambique I was given the rare opportunity as a foreigner to visit a camp called Codzo, seventy miles from the Zimbabwe border. I was accompanied by a government escort officer and a government translator, so no doubt I saw only what Mozambican authorities wanted me to see. Nevertheless, I found nothing to confirm the stories of barbaric treatment that trickled out of the camps in the early months of independence.

  Codzo was a prison with no walls, no gates, no clanking steel doors. Approaching it on the dusty road that pushes through head-high elephant grass, I saw what looked like a typical African village. Mud-walled, thatch-roofed bungalows were clustered near the little schoolhouse. Chickens scurried along the dirt paths. A Mozambican flag fluttered from a stick poked into the ground. In the fields, men wearing baggy black uniforms and blue sneakers toiled over patches of turnips and potatoes. The camp commander told me none of the guards carried guns, but I saw at least a dozen who did.

  There were eight hundred male prisoners, ranging in age from sixteen to the mid-thirties. Some were petty criminals or drug addicts, others were described as enemies of the revolution. None was ever charged or tried in court, and none knew how long he would stay. One teen-age boy I talked to had been imprisoned merely for getting drunk and forgetting his identification card. Everyone in Codzo spent ninety minutes a day in sessions devoted to self-criticism and Marxist orientation, and everyone was taught a trade, from carpentry to farming.

  President Machel bristles at criticism about the camps, pointing out that Mozambique, unlike some African countries, has chosen to educate its dissidents, not kill them. Besides, Machel says, the camps are but one minuscule aspect of a revolution designed to reconstruct a country. And the problems that revolution faces are indeed great.

  Educated administrators are in such short supply in Mozambique that youths fresh out of college are made provincial directors (governors); agricultural production has tumbled since independence and foreign investors have been scared away by radical fiscal policies; government red tape turns the smallest daily chore into an obstacle course of frustration; 70 percent of the population is under the age of eighteen, and most are so unsophisticated that when thousands of them moved out of the slums and into seaside apartments and lovely old homes abandoned by—or nationalized from—the Portuguese, Machel warned, “Remember, you must not keep chickens in your new homes.”

  There were 200,000 Portuguese in Mozambique before independence, and although Mozambique was not a penal colony, they managed to ravage the land and retard the Africans’ growth as thoroughly as had their counterparts in Angola. The country had a healthy industrial output of $40 million a year at independence and only 10 percent of the food was imported, but the economy was built by and for the European settler. White-oriented services such as banking, insurance and tourism accounted for a staggering 63 percent of the economy; agricultural, mining and industry for only 37 percent.

  Machel, though, had learned the lessons of African history. Despite all that his people had endured at the hands of the colonialists, despite the bitterness of the liberation war, he asked the Portuguese to stay on after independence, knowing that a European exodus would cripple an already wounded country. “We want harmony among the races,” Machel said. “For the sake of national construction, we must have the support of all people on every continent and of every race.”

  His message was reminiscent of the one Jomo Kenyatta had delivered to the white farmers in the Kenyan highlands just before independence. But in Mozambique, Machel’s words fell on unbelieving ears, and the jittery Portuguese started packing. “We really believed that Machel’s movement was a terrorist organization and that the terrorists were going to kill civilians and rape our wives and eat our daughters,” a Portuguese merchant who left told me. Within a few months all but 20,000 of the Portuguese had gone. Their departure devastated Mozambique as thoroughly as the white exodus did in Angola. There was, incidentally, never any recrimination or retaliation against the Europeans, and Machel’s closest advisers soon included blacks, Indians and whites. (On my last visit, three of his cabinet ministers were white Angolans.)

  Why did the whites stay in Kenya and flee from Mozambique and Angola?

  First, the British settler was a person of much higher caliber than the Portuguese expatriate. He had an attachment to the land and a stake in the country’s prosperity. Africa really was his home, and his own future depended on making it work.

  Britain had won its war against the African freedom fighters; Portugal had lost its. In Kenya, there was a seven-year hiatus between the end of the Mau Mau emergency and the birth of nationhood. The Europeans and Africans had time to work out their differences and establish a structure for majority rule. In Mozambique and Angola, the liberation wars led directly to instant independence, and the guerrilla movements became the governments.

  Independence in Kenya did not bring a radical shift in political and economic philosophies; Mozambique and Angola became Marxist. Economies were nationalized, farming cooperatives established, one-party systems created, the free press dismantled. (Colonial Angola had seventeen radio stations, sixteen newspapers and fifteen magazines; independent Angola has two newspapers and one radio station, all under government control.) There was no room for Europeans who were not committed ideologues.

  Marxism has fai
led in Mozambique and Angola—just as it has failed everywhere in Africa. Everywhere it has been tried, national economies have stagnated, the masses have been kept ignorant of their right to question, Soviet influence has grown beyond any reasonable limits, repression has become a key government tool, over-bureaucratization has destroyed what little efficiency existed in the public and private sectors. Africa, unlike, say, China, does not have the tradition of central government so essential to the propagation of Communism. It has no history of placing common welfare above that of the family or tribe. It has no experience in being industrious in any endeavor unrelated to individual survival. The tenets of Marxism are alien to African culture.

  Marxism failed in Somalia and Algeria because nationalism and an adherence to Islam proved stronger than any dedication to a political system. Ghana, Guinea, the Sudan and the Congo all flirted with it but found that economic realities carried more weight than visionary ideals. Ethiopia is still trying it but has accomplished little other than the death of many of its people in a government terror campaign against “counterrevolutionaries.” President Julius Nyerere’s dreams of a socialistic Tanzania sounded fine in the classroom but in practical application did nothing to advance his country economically. Political ideology, whether it is imported from East or West, does not fill empty stomachs or rebuild abandoned factories. It merely usurps energies that should be devoted to national development. It leaves a numbed people mumbling foolish slogans at the command of their presidents, and if that ideology is Marxist, it removes all individual economic incentives. The result is that an untrained, uneducated people have no motivation, and care little about increased production. The tropical sun gives them warmth, the fertile earth gives them food, the tribe gives them protection. Surrounded by decay, denied the opportunity to rise above the crowd through industriousness and ingenuity, they do what they must to survive, but not much more.